Jackie Robinson’s Inner Struggle

It was Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1947 — Game 1 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers — and Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson was making history. The Dodger first baseman was standing in a packed Yankee Stadium about to hear the national anthem. From a distance, the tableau can seem an inspiring inflection point: the first Black major leaguer in the 20th century playing in the first televised World Series. “There I was,” Robinson recalled in his 1972 memoir “I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography,” “the Black grandson of a slave, the son of a Black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people.” So far, so good: The safe narrative of Robinson-as-stoic-hero is intact. “The band struck up the national anthem,” he wrote. “It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words … poured from the stands.” Yet if we see the scene through Robinson’s eyes — and hear the anthem through his ears — we encounter an altogether different story. Writing a quarter of a century after the 1947 World Series, Robinson observed, “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

To many white fans of the game, the tale of Jackie Robinson is redemptive and transporting. The number 42 is retired across the major leagues; Robinson is a secular saint, revered for his skill and his bravery in making what was known as the noble experiment of desegregating baseball before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Montgomery bus boycott, before the March on Washington, before Selma. The truth, as Robinson told it in his affecting and candid autobiography, is vastly more complicated, and the book repays attention as the nation grapples anew with race. “I Never Had It Made” offers compelling testimony about the realities of being Black in America from an author who long ago became more a monument than a man, and his memoir is an illuminating meditation on racism not only in the national pastime but in the nation itself.

Robinson’s journey to the majors started in the back of a bus. He had been signed to a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ minor-league Montreal club. Ordered to spring training in Sanford, Fla. — and this being 1946, Jim Crow was very much in force — Robinson, a veteran of World War II and a former U.C.L.A. athletic star, had been forced to ride in the segregated section of a bus on the way to camp. He and Johnny Wright, a pitcher in the Negro leagues who’d also been signed as a prospect by the Dodger co-owner and general manager, Branch Rickey, were anxious about the reception that might be awaiting them. “We had to feel our way in this entire matter,” Robinson recalled in an earlier book, “Jackie Robinson: My Own Story,” published in 1948. In the clubhouse, a Dodger organization man, Babe Hamburger, offered some counsel. “Well, fellows,” Hamburger said, “I’m not exactly what you’d call a part of this great experiment, but I’m gonna give you some advice anyway. Just go out there and do your best. Don’t get tense. Just be yourselves.”

Robinson was underwhelmed. “Be ourselves?” he asked himself. “Here in the heart of the race-conscious South? … Johnny and I both realized that this was hostile territory — that anything could happen any time to a Negro who thought he could play ball with white men on an equal basis. It was going to be difficult to relax and behave naturally. But we assured Babe we’d try.”

Try they did — and Robinson succeeded mightily, becoming a pioneering major leaguer, a Hall of Famer and, in that most tired but still accurate of phrases, an American icon. Moments after Hamburger shared his words of wisdom, reporters asked Robinson what he’d do if a pitcher threw at his head. “Duck,” Robinson replied. He’d wind up doing a great deal of that.

One day in Robinson’s inaugural big-league season in 1947, the Philadelphia Phillies, led by their manager, Ben Chapman, were assaulting the Dodger first baseman with especially virulent racist taunts and epithets. “For one wild and rage-crazed minute I thought, ‘To hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment,’” Robinson recalled. “It’s clear it won’t succeed. … I thought what a glorious, cleansing thing it would be to let go. To hell with the image of the patient Black freak I was supposed to create. I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised Black fist. Then I could walk away from it all.”